Operator polish — your Mac is a validator

Session 3 of the Valdium Operator build shipped today. The app now runs a real ValdiumNode as a child process — not a mock, not a remote viewer, a real validator syncing real blocks from real peers across three continents.

The onboarding flow

First launch: a full-screen overlay. "Welcome to Valdium Operator." Two steps before you see anything else.

Step 1: Create your wallet. Password (min 8 chars), confirm, click Create. A Dilithium3 keypair is generated, encrypted with scrypt (N=131072) + AES-GCM-256, and saved to your machine. Takes about 2 seconds. Your private key never exists unencrypted on disk.

Step 2: Sync the blockchain. Before you can validate, your machine needs the full chain. The app tells you upfront: ~50 MB, 2–10 minutes. You click "Start Syncing" and watch. The sync screen has a circular progress bar — real sync progress. Block 1,234 / 85,000 · ~3m 42s remaining · 250 blocks/sec. You can't skip the sync.

What the dashboard shows

The dashboard detects whether your wallet is in the active validator set. Three states: Not staked (shows the fund → stake flow), Pending (your stake just landed, activating in a few blocks), and Active ✓ (you're producing blocks, showing stake, block height, peers, and live consensus quorum).

The node status panel

Node status               [running]
Local node          ● active
Block height        #2,847
Block time          2.0s
Peers               4 validators
Consensus           BFT · quorum 4/5

The technical reality

The Operator app spawns the ValdiumNode as a child process — same binary as the VPS validators, same consensus code, same BFT voting. When you stake from the GUI, the app prompts for your password, decrypts your Dilithium3 private key, builds a bond(pubKey, 1000 VLD) transaction targeting the staking contract, signs it, broadcasts it, and shows a persistent toast with the tx hash and explorer link. Zero CLI commands. Zero config files. Zero terminal.

There are five validators on the Valdium testnet right now. Four run on Hetzner VPS boxes. The fifth runs on a MacBook, set up entirely through a GUI. Same consensus. Same 2-second blocks. Same Dilithium3 signatures. One of them just happens to have a nicer UI. That's the everybody chain. — dev team